"She's Got A Good Heart"

It never fails, at least once every month or so, I’ll be in the kitchen at Wednesday night church and I’ll hear some of the older ladies talking about some child or friend, and they’ll make the statement, “but (s)he’s got a good heart”.

It didn’t used to bother me, either. I’d hear the story of whoever the person was, and no matter if it was a girl on drugs, or a young boy with anger issues, it was always the same. “They’ve got a good heart.”

The sad thing is, it became a family joke to us. We weren’t trying to be disrespectful, but it was our way to respond to it, since there wasn’t anything we could do about it.

And then recently I realized our desensitization to it. After hearing it for however long we’d been hearing it, it no longer bothered us.

Which isn’t a problem, right? I mean, it seems innocent... except, I don’t think it is.

I don’t remember ever hearing Jesus or the Apostles (or anyone else in the scripture, for that matter), ever tell someone that they had a “good” heart. In fact, I remember quite the opposite....

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked;

Who can know it?”

Jeremiah 17:9

For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.”

Matthew 15:19-20

So He said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.”

Matthew 19:17a

So, where exactly did this idea/phrase come from? And why is it being propagated?

It seems like it came from the “God is love” movement. You know, the one where God is going to allow everyone into heaven because, “Hey, I’m a good person”.

In mainstream churches, it seems like believers have forgotten that humans are extremely sinful and that people can only truly understand what Jesus did for them when they understand what they owed. When they see that their debt to God is far more than they could ever pay, then the death of Christ makes more sense to them.

If you tell an unbeliever that they have a “good heart” and then tell them that they need Christ, you are sort of contradicting yourself. Because if someone had a good heart, they wouldn’t need God because they could get to heaven out of their own “goodness”.

Which can make it very hard for these people to come to know Christ because they were, in fact, lied to about the state of their soul.

Hmm, I feel like I’m ranting....

Have you noticed this? The more I’ve been thinking about it, the more it’s been bothering me. Any thoughts?